


Miss Pauling Gets a Cat

by PreludeInZ



Series: The Morbid, Macabre, and Myriad Adventures of Miss Edith Amelia Pauling [6]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Dark Humor, Fluff, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:34:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2554730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ





	Miss Pauling Gets a Cat

The cat had come in the mail. Miss Pauling did not want the cat.

Her mother had called her about the cat. Her mother had not called her in years. The last time her mother had called her, it was because her grandfather had died. Her mother had called her two weeks after the funeral. Miss Pauling didn’t know where or how she had gotten her number. Her father must have pulled some strings.

For weeks afterward, she was paranoid that her parents had hired a private investigator to follow her around, to find out where she was and what she was doing. To what end, she didn’t know. In her line of work, she just knew that it would be A Very Bad Thing. She had finally needed to talk to Spy, to ask him to confirm that she was just being paranoid. Spy had discovered that she was being stalked by a former convict from Albuquerque, with less than noble intentions, and he had been dealt with. But no private investigator.

It had been a really terrible cat. When she had been five, the cat had been a kitten. When it had been a kitten, it had not been so bad. That was the problem with kittens, though. They inevitably turned into cats.

This was a cat of the meanest sort. Miss Pauling had still been Edith Amelia the last time she had lived with a cat, and it had been this cat, had never known what she had done to get on the cat’s bad side. She had wondered about it for ages. She couldn’t remember anything specific, but she was certain she must have done something, on accident, to the cat when it was a kitten. Because one day it had just started to hate her.

The cat moved into her room. Edith Amelia only occupied her room for a few months in the summer when boarding school let out, or only a week if her parents could find a socially appropriate summer camp to send her to. If the cat had stayed in her room because it loved her and missed her and was lonely, that would have been nice and sweet. But the cat moved into her room because it was vindictive.

Edith Amelia’s room was shut up during the school year. No one knew how the cat got in.

But it got in every year. Sometimes it was evicted before she got home for the summer, but it always managed to do some damage. It broke anything she hadn’t hidden before leaving for school, and some of the things that she had. It peed and shat and left half eaten dead animals in places where they weren’t readily apparent. It was the bane of the housemaid, who needed to be paid overtime in order to deal with it.

Her mother had loved that cat.

Presumably this was why she had had it stuffed when it had finally succumbed to old age, or to the gnawing blackness of pure evil that resided within it like a cancer. Why she had then mailed it to her estranged daughter with a note saying “Here is my darling Frobisher to remind you of home” was an utter mystery.

Maybe her mother had loved the cat too much to keep it around. She had loved it too much to cremate it or bury it like a normal person. Maybe this was her mother’s way of trying to reach out? Of giving her something that had been precious, to try and tempt her back into contact? Edith Amelia had never understood her mother. There were bad mothers in the world, and she knew that  _now_ , but hadn’t for years. What was she supposed to do with a dead, cancerously evil cat?

She stared at him in his box, for a long time. He’d been wrapped in grey tissue paper. It was a beautiful job, she had nearly had a heart attack upon opening the box. She tried to put him on her mantel, but next to him, her raccoon skull (Helton) just looked sad and forlorn. Far less magnificent than Frobisher, in his frozen attitude of ferocious regality. She took the cat off the mantel.

She put him back in his box. She closed the box up. She fetched a pen and paper from her desk, and composed a letter.

> Dear Pyro,
> 
> This is my mom’s dead cat. I don’t know why she sent it to me and I don’t want it, but I don’t want to just throw it out, that seems wrong for some reason. You can keep him or burn him as you like, but he was really evil and I don’t know how taxidermy works and if he’s safe to burn. Please be careful if you decide to burn him.
> 
> Regards and many thanks,
> 
> Miss Pauling

She put the box in the back of her truck and drove to work. Generally she liked to play the radio, but instead she drove in silence and thought about her mother. It was a longer drive than usual.


End file.
